Facebook Just Had Another Record Quarter, and It Has Apple to Thank

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg gestures while delivering the keynote address at the f8 Facebook Developer Conference Wednesday, April 30, 2014, in San Francisco. Ben Margot/AP

Once upon a time, Facebook was struggling. Mark Zuckerberg had taken his young company public in one of the most anticipated IPOs of the past 10 years, and shares floundered. Facebook was bringing in money from ads on the desktop, but the desktop wasn’t where people were moving. They were moving to their phones, where no one—including Facebook—had figured out how to make ads work.

That’s not true anymore. Yesterday, Facebook reported yet another quarter where its revenue rose to a record high. Most significantly, mobile ad revenue doubled compared to the same time last year, breaking $2 billion for the first time.

Facebook deserves a lot of credit for figuring out new ways to make smartphones a true home for its ad products. But over the past three months especially, the company may be benefitting from a major assist. Apple posted record profits this week largely thanks to sales of its new iPhones with bigger screens. On those screens, Facebook’s ads look better than ever.

For years, mobile ads have riled even the most powerful online companies. The “cost per click” of a Google ad, for example—one of the key measures of an online ad’s value—has dropped steadily as users move to mobile devices. On phones, sites haven’t shown the same ability to draw in users, since ads simply can’t command the same kind of real estate on smaller screens. But that downward trend shows signs of abating.

Adobe, the same software maker that brought the world Photoshop and Flash, also does a brisk business in showing advertisers how well their online ad campaigns are doing. In a recent survey, the company says it analyzed 500 billion ad impressions on Google and Yahoo/Bing along with 400 billion post impressions on Facebook.

Among the findings: starting in September, after flat-lining for the first two-thirds of the year, cost-per-click rates on Google and Yahoo started climbing. For the quarter, cost-per-clicks were up 8 percent overall and 6 percent on smartphones. The rise isn’t huge, but the change in direction is significant, especially if the trend continues. Mobile ads are finally becoming more valuable.

How can that be? Considering we the media covered the event like the tech version of the Super Bowl, few people don’t know that September was also when Apple introduced the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus to the world. Granted, the idea that those bigger screens immediately translated into higher value for online ads is a stretch. But seeing as Apple reported yesterday selling 74.5 million iPhones during the last quarter, it’s less of a stretch to imagine the spread of those bigger screens having an impact over time.

For Facebook and Google, which reports its earnings today, the importance of the new, larger iPhones’ popularity is tough to overstate. Yes, Apple isn’t the first company to make a smartphone with a big screen. But iPhones command the high end of the consumer market—that is, people with money to spend, which are people advertisers most want to reach.

And despite having only a modest share of the overall mobile market compared to Android, iOS users have historically shown themselves to be far more engaged users. That is, they interact with their phones more, which makes them especially likely to respond to ads—ads that now happen to be bigger.

Finally, no other handset maker has quite the ability, at least in the US, to move users from one device to another en masse. Over the last three months, Apple has migrated millions of mobile users onto bigger screens, the screens where Facebook’s ads work best. “Other players can come in and make little ripples,” Adobe Digital Index principal analyst Tamara Gaffney tells WIRED. “When Apple comes in, it makes a tidal wave.”

Comcast Renames Man ‘Asshole Brown’ After He Tries to Cancel Cable

A Comcast truck seen in Pompano Beach, Florida, February 13, 2014. Joe Raedle/Getty Images

Comcast probably doesn’t relish being one of those companies that many Americans love to hate. But sometimes, the cable giant makes this way too easy.

Consider the case of Ricardo Brown. After Brown’s wife had a disagreement with the cable company recently, Comcast started sending him monthly statements under the name “Asshole Brown.”

The disagreement happened when Brown’s wife Lisa tried to cancel her cable. She got referred to one of the company’s dreaded “retention specialists,” who apparently didn’t like being told “no,” as Lisa Brown told the blogger Christopher Elliott, who first reported the story.

“I was never rude,” she told Elliott. “It could have been that person was upset because I didn’t take the offer.”

Like many phone companies and ISPs, Comcast makes it frighteningly difficult to cancel an account. The company retaining an army of retention specialists whose sole job is to keep you from signing off. Last year, the journalist Ryan Block recorded a Kafkaesque conversation he had with a Comcast retention specialist from hell. That call has been listened to nearly 6 million times.

Comcast spokesman Steve Kipp confirmed the Browns’ story to WIRED. “We have spoken with our customer and apologized for this completely unacceptable and inappropriate name change,” he told us via email. “We have zero tolerance for this type of disrespectful behavior and are conducting a thorough investigation to determine what happened. We are working with our customer to make this right and will take appropriate steps to prevent this from happening again.”

According to Elliott, Comcast is also offering the Brown’s a full refund for the past two years of service.

A Heroin Dealer Tells the Silk Road Jury What It Was Like to Sell Drugs Online

For its two and a half years online, thousands of drug dealers sold every kind of narcotic imaginable on the anonymous online marketplace known as the Silk Road. But put one of the site’s heroin dealers in a courtroom and ask him questions under oath, and the scale and consequences of that drug empire suddenly seem much more real.

Today at the trial of Ross Ulbricht, the 30-year-old Texan accused of running the Silk Road’s contraband bazaar, prosecutors called to the stand Michael Duch, a 40-year-old Silk Road heroin dealer from New York state. Duch told the court that he had been arrested in October of 2013, pleaded guilty to narcotics trafficking, and agreed to testify in the hopes of lessening his sentence. Duch, who went by the name Deezletime on Silk Road, had nothing to say about the defendant Ulbricht himself. Instead, he explained to the jury the dark details of selling highly addictive drugs on the website the government accuses Ulbricht of masterminding.

In just the six months from April to the end of September 2013, Duch sold more than 2,400 orders of heroin, totaling nearly 32,000 individual, 10-milligram “stamp” bags branded with names like “black magic,” “murder,” and “hot shots,” he said. He made between $60,000 and $70,000 a month during that time, much of which went to his own serious heroin habit. And perhaps most importantly for the jury, Duch explained why the “safety and anonymity” of the Silk Road persuaded him to sell on the site despite having never sold drugs on the street.

“I saw the relative ease that came with it,” he told the court. “It seemed like something I could get away with.”

Duch also described how the Silk Road’s customer base allowed him to reach buyers who he believed wouldn’t have otherwise had access to his product. The prosecution showed an alphabetized list of hundreds of cities around the country that had received Duch’s heroin shipments from a Monroe, New York post office, double-vacuum sealed and disguised with a fake return address. “Someone out in [a place like] Utah would be able to get heroin. The Silk Road made heroin available to them,” Duch said.

Duch isn’t the first Silk Road heroin dealer to tell his story. But telling it under oath in the cold light of a Manhattan courtroom, it could leave Ulbricht’s jury with a grisly impression of the Silk Road’s impact on its most deeply addicted users. At one point, prosecutor Serrin Turner read aloud from messages sent to Duch from his customers begging him to ship quickly as they slipped into withdrawal.

“I just want to check [on the shipment] because I am extremely dope sick and NEED something right now,” read one message.

“I’m throwing up, the worst of the worst withdrawal symptoms, and plus I have life-destroying pain,” Turner read from another.

Turner asked Duch if those sorts of messages were frequent. “I got these messages every day,” he replied.

As the time, Duch had resorted to dealing to manage his own all-consuming drug habit, he told the jury. Starting as early as 2007, he had become addicted to painkillers prescribed by a doctor for sports injuries, and eventually moved on to snorting and then injecting heroin. By late 2012, he was buying painkillers from the Silk Road, which he says he heard about from news media. And as his own narcotics consumption escalated to a cost of $3,500 a week, he started dealing.

“I had an addiction,” Duch said, with an expression of subdued pain he wore throughout his testimony. “I needed to feed it.”

Duch says he would buy heroin in $6,000 “bricks” from a supplier he’d meet in Passaic, New Jersey, and then sell it online from his Silk Road account at a 100-percent markup. Though he also sold on dark web markets like Black Market Reloaded and Atlantis, he testified that 99-percent of his sales went through the Silk Road, because of its massive customer base.

Aside from offering a hands-on account of how the Silk Road worked from a dealer’s perspective, Duch’s story calls into question claims that the Silk Road reduced violence by moving drug sales from the street to the relative safety of the internet. Duch’s testimony seemed to suggest that he wouldn’t have sold drugs at all if it weren’t for the Silk Road, and that–at least in his opinion—many of his customers wouldn’t have bought them.

But it’s also important to note that heroin may not have been a major seller on the Silk Road compared with less harmful drugs like marijuana and ecstasy. A study last year found that the most addictive drugs, such as heroin, methamphetamine and crack accounted for only a small part of the site’s total revenue.

In its cross-examination of Duch, which had only started when court adjourned Wednesday evening, Ulbricht’s defense attorney Joshua Dratel emphasized that Duch’s testimony was the result of a deal with prosecutors. Without that deal, he argued that Duch could face 20 years in a mandatory minimum sentence for his high volume of drug sales and prior convictions.

Duch, who said he hasn’t used drugs since his arrest in 2013, told the jury that his own health, his relationship with his girlfriend, and his career as an IT consultant all suffered from his heroin and painkiller use.

“The same drug that had impacted your life in this way, you were selling to thousands of people on Silk Road?” prosecutor Turner asked him.

“Yes, I was,” Duch said. “It was something that bothered me on a daily basis.”

Amazon Challenges Google and Microsoft With WorkMail Service

Yes, Amazon is best known as an e-commerce company. But with its pioneering collection of cloud computing services, it’s also an IT company, a company that serves up tech to the world’s businesses. And its IT ambitions just keep getting bigger.

Today, the company announced an online email and digital calendar service dubbed WorkMail. According to the Wall Street Journal, WorkMail is meant to compete with email services from the likes of Microsoft. Amazon will charge $4 per month for each inbox, and workers can use it via Microsoft Outlook or other familiar email clients.

For added security, the WSJ reports, Amazon will provide technology needed to encrypt messages on WorkMail, while companies that use the service will control the keys needed to unscramble the encryption. Within certain industries and in countries where privacy is paramount—Germany and other European countries, for instance—Amazon will also provide a tool meant to ensure that emails are only stored in designated geographic regions.

With the new service, Amazon is joining a host of others in the quest to upend Microsoft as the king of email and other office productivity tools. Competitors include Google, with its Apps for Business, as well as myriad startups, including Dropbox, Evernote, Box.com, and Quip.

These Are the Hottest New Open Source Projects Right Now

Yagi Studio/Getty Images

Gobs of new open source projects are released every year, but only a few really capture the imaginations of businesses and developers.

Open source software management company Black Duck tries to spot these, measuring which projects attract the most contributors, produce the most code, and garner the most attention from the developer world at large.

Dubbed the Black Duck Rookies of the Year, the ranking isn’t a perfect measure of the project popularity, but it can be can tell us a bit about where the world of open source is going. And that’s no small thing. So much of the internet–and the modern business world—now runs on open source software, software that’s freely shared with the world at large.

Judging from Black Duck’s latest list, software developers are particularly interested in building widely distributed online applications that operate outside the control of big tech companies such as Google, Apple, and Amazon—applications like the bitcoin digital currency. Bitcoin is a system that runs across a vast network of machines that’s outside the control of central banks or governments.

Software hacker types have long been interested in this sort of decentralization, but interest in such egalitarian operations has risen since NSA whistle blower Edward Snowden revealed the scope of the agency’s surveillance activities. And it’s now at an all-time high.

Beyond Bitcoin

According to Black Duck, one of last year’s most successful new projects was Storj, which aims to use bitcoin’s technology to help users store file online without sacrificing their privacy. Think of it as bitcoin meets Dropbox.

The idea is that you’ll upload your files to Storj’s distributed cloud, but only you’ll be the only one with the keys to decrypt your data. Plus, you can sell your extra storage space to make money.

IPFS—short for “InterPlanetary File System”—is even more ambitious. The project aims to create a censorship-resistant alternative to the web, taking inspiration from peer-to-peer technologies like BitTorrent.

And given all the uproar over the Silk Road, the bitcoin-based marketplace most famous for illicit drugs, it’s hardly surprising to see OpenBazaar on Black Duck’s list. OpenBazaar aims to do for Silk Road what BitTorrent did for Napster: create a decentralized alternative that the government can’t shut down.

The Container Craze

But decentralization isn’t the only thing developers are interested in. As the internet expands, they’re also hard at work on new software projects that can facilitate this expansion—projects that can help juggle enormous amounts of online traffic and data.

Google knows more about this kind of thing than any other company. So it’s no surprise that many of these new projects were either created by Googlers or ex-Googlers.

One example is Kubernetes, a Google project that aims to help developers make use of Linux “containers”—a red-hot technology that can improve the efficiency of vast online applications. Another is cAdvisor, a tool created by Googlers to help monitor the performance of containers. And then there’s Cockroach DB—a database system created by ex-Googlers and inspired by an internal Google project called Spanner.

The rise of CockroachDB “suggests a sizable unmet need in the database space,” says founder Spencer Kimball. And so many other projects on the Black Duck list suggest similar holes in the market. But those holes are being filled.

Canada Joins World Powers in Spying on Smartphone and Download Data

Getty Images

In North America, the Canadians have long had to play country mouse to the flashier city mouse of the U.S. It’s the latter that gets all the attention, while the former sits quietly in a corner.

But recent stories have shown just how big a player the Canadians are becoming—at least in the surveillance realm.

On Monday, a new report was released, based on leaked documents from Edward Snowden, showing that Canadian intelligence agencies—part of the Five Eyes spying conglomerate that includes the U.S., the UK, Australia and New Zealand—partnered with UK spies to siphon sensitive data from thousands of smartphones by sniffing traffic between applications on the phones and the servers owned by the companies that made the applications. The so-called Badass program is designed to sniff the normal unencrypted communication traffic of certain smartphone apps to glean location information, the unique identifier of the phone and other data that can help spies learn the identity of phone users, among other things. It can also be used to uncover vulnerabilities in a phone to help spies hack it.

Now today, another report by The Intercept, based on Snowden documents, indicates that Canada’s Communications Security Establishment spy agency has also been spying on the download streams from popular content-sharing sites for video, photos and music. According to the program, dubbed Levitation, the spies have tapped internet cables to filter and analyzes up to 15 million downloads daily in several countries across Europe, the Middle East, North Africa, and North America.

The program is aimed at identifying individuals or groups who are uploading and downloading content potentially related to terrorism—for example, tutorial videos about making bombs—but in casting a wide net on all content, the spies would also be able to monitor the sharing activity of millions of other users not connected to any terrorist activity.

According to a 2012 PowerPoint presentation, the Communications Security Establishment agency finds about 350 “interesting” downloads each month, a minute fraction (less than 0.0001 percent) of the massive amount of data collected. The agency stores details about downloads and uploads for more than 100 popular file-sharing sites such as RapidShare, SendSpace, and the former MegaUpload of Kim Dotcom.

The spy agency siphons the data directly from tapped internet cables and identifies the unique IP address for each computer that downloads files from the sites. Analysts can then use the IP addresses to search through other surveillance databases—including ones shared with other spy agencies like the NSA—to find matching information and expand their knowledge of the computer/person behind the download, such as other sites they visited. This can also help identify social networking accounts belonging to the person, like Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter accounts as well as email accounts.

Presumably in both spy operations—the mobile phone and file-sharing operations—the agency’s activity is thwarted by traffic that is encrypted. Of course, not all applications or file-sharing sites encrypt the traffic between users and their servers.

The leaked documents cite only two cases where the content-sharing operation uncovered relevant terrorist-related content: a hostage video that was uncovered in connection to a previously unknown target, and an uploaded document that contained the hostage strategy of a terrorist organization. The Intercept reports that the hostage who appears in the cited video was ultimately killed.

The Digital Divide Is Not Binary

brunkfordbraun/Flickr

Economic growth and social inclusion, critical issues for many countries, will be promoted by bringing the four-plus billion non-Internet users around the world online. The common view of this digital divide is that it separates the Internet “haves” from the “have-nots”; dividing those who are online from those who would like to get online, but are prevented based on the availability or affordability of access.

When It Comes Solving the Digital Divide, We’re Missing Something

This binary view of the digital divide is fostered by a positive feedback loop – the haves understandably assume everyone wants to join them, while those who face barriers in getting online understandably push for access. However, as shown in the first annual Internet Society Global Internet Report, there is an overlooked divide within the have-nots, between those who are interested to get online, and those who are not.

The graph below shows the population of each country, represented by a horizontal bar divided into three groups of citizens. First, the proportion of the population who are online, represented by the dark blue section on the left of each country’s bar. Second, those not online who indicate in surveys that they do not have online access or cannot afford access, represented by the lighter blue section on the right. Finally, those not online who state that they are not interested in going online, represented by the lightest blue section in the middle of each bar.

As shown in the graph, in the countries surveyed, more non-Internet users indicate that they are not online because of a lack of interest, understanding or time, rather than the affordability or availability of access. This holds true even in countries towards the bottom such as Colombia, where the affordability (represented in the figure by the green dot indicating the subscription price as a proportion of average income) is highest of all the countries surveyed.

While Getting Access is Key, It’s Only Half the Battle

These results suggest a nuanced approach to the digital divide, one that focuses not just on providing affordable and universal access to the Internet, but also on increasing interest in the use of the resulting access. In fact, we have seen that as the infrastructure necessary for Internet access is becoming more available in developing countries, efforts to close the digital divide have increasingly focused on promoting local content to develop interest in using the Internet and drive uptake.

However, it is not enough to ensure that content is relevant – for starters, in the right language – but it must also be accessible. Most, if not all, developing countries have local content, however, it is often located in Europe or the United States where hosting services are less expensive. In an Internet Society paper released last week, we show that hosting content abroad not only makes it more expensive and slower to access that content, it discourages the creation of new content.

We Need to Think Bigger

Policymakers must take a broad approach to bridge the digital divide – ensuring not just that affordable access is available, but also that there is demand that leads to adoption and usage. Only in this way will the full economic and social impact of the Internet be felt by all.

Michael Kende is Chief Economist of the Internet Society.

Facebook Challenges Twitter at This Year’s Super Bowl With Real-Time Hub, Targeted Ads

The Super Bowl is days away, and Facebook has two new reasons for you to keep one eye on its site while the other follows America’s mammoth television event.

On Wednesday, the social media giant is launched Trending Super Bowl, a real-time hub that brings together content from Sunday’s game between the Patriots and Seahawks. Facebookers will be able to follow the game’s progress with a live scoreboard on the hub, and see a running play-by-play from the game.

For those who care more about the ads between play, the site will also run some videos of the Super Bowl’s biggest commercials. And it will pull various the Super Bowl-related posts, photos and videos from the media, celebrities, and, yes, your friends.

“We have been the second-screen, real-time audience,” Dan Reed, head of global sports partnerships at Facebook, told the Associated Press. “This Trending Super Bowl is part of a broader effort to better surface the great conversations happening in real time around live sporting events.”

More people now prefer to be on some kind of social media while watching a live television event, and that’s not a new thing. According to the 2014 Nielsen Digital Consumer Report, 84 percent of U.S. smartphone and tablet owners today watch television with a second screen in hand. Facebook claims 85 percent of those people are on its site. It’s no surprise the social media giant wants an even bigger slice of that pie.

And though Facebook hasn’t said so outright, it surely wants to steal at least some of an audience away from another well-watched social media platform during live TV events: Twitter. Twitter has long been the natural companion of TV viewers during broadcasts, in part because of its nature as a real-time social network. Facebook’s Super Bowl hub is its chance to prove that it can do live events just as well as Twitter—or even better. To get a jump on the action, Facebook’s Trending Super Bowl will be live as early as Saturday morning.

That’s not the only arena where Facebook is seeking to challenge Twitter. Today, Reuters reports that Facebook is, for the first time, executing an ad strategy that will let the social network sell ads that target people based on what they are talking about in real-time—a tactic Twitter has already deployed in the past. When the lights went out during the Super Bowl in 2013, Mondelez International’s Oreo cleverly took advantage of the situation and sent out a bunch of tweets, a stunt that was considered to be a marketing coup.

At this year’s Super Bowl, Facebook will be able to automatically trigger videos to play on users’ newsfeeds, set off by certain keywords that users mention in their posts as they watch the game live.

Of course, the Super Bowl is not the first time Facebook and Twitter have battled it out for people’s attention. During the World Cup last year, both social networks announced impressive engagement statistics around the event. Facebook said it saw 3 billion interactions, including likes, comments and posts, from 350 million users throughout the event. By comparison, Twitter announced that its users shared 672 million tweets related to the World Cup throughout the tournament. And while those numbers may make it seem that Facebook was the clear winner, it’s not really a fair comparison given Facebook’s massive user base—about five times that of Twitter.

Still, the direct challenges issued by Facebook this Super Bowl pose a threat to Twitter. Now a public company, Twitter has faced increasing pressure from investors who are concerned about the social network’s less-than-stellar user engagement and slow user growth. Big television events like the Super Bowl are an opportunity for the network to help this problem, at least in the short term.

Sony Partners With Spotify to Launch a PlayStation Streaming Service

For Sony, it’s out with the old, and in with the new.

Today, the tech conglomerate announced that it’s ditching its existing streaming music service, Sony Music Unlimited, and replacing it with a new service called Playstation Music, which will give users access to 30 million songs and 1.5 billion playlists, all powered by Spotify. The new service is set to launch some time this spring on the PS4 and PS3 game consoles, as well as on Xperia smartphones and tablets.

For Sony, this partnership is a bold admission that when it comes to infiltrating the increasingly competitive streaming music industry, even a company like Sony needs some help. It faces existing rivals like Pandora, and until now, Spotify, as well as newer ones, like Apple, which acquired Beats Electronics for $3 billion last year and is now working to make Beats’ music streaming service an integral part of the iPhone experience. Even Google recently got into the streaming space, acquiring the playlist company, Songza, last summer.

With the Spotify partnership, Sony acquires not only industry expertise and an immense library of music, but also a wider international footprint. To date, Music Unlimited has been operating in 19 countries, but Spotify will more than double that number, bringing PlayStation Music to 41 markets at launch.

“Music is a core component of the entertainment offering that consumers expect from Sony, and our goal with PlayStation Music is to provide the most compelling music experiences to the millions of PlayStation Network users around the world,” Andrew House, President and Group CEO of Sony Computer Entertainment, said in a statement. “This partnership represents the best in music and the best in gaming coming together, which will benefit the vibrant and passionate communities of both Spotify and PlayStation Network.”

For Spotify, this partnership is another way of inserting itself into users’ lives. If Spotify is already pre-loaded on devices and in apps, users have less motivation to seek out other services. Spotify took a similar approach when it partnered with Uber last year, enabling Uber riders to play music from their Spotify accounts during Uber rides.

And yet, despite the obvious business advantages to partnering with a major device manufacturer like Sony, Spotify CEO and founder Daniel Ek cited much more mundane motivations for the partnership. “As a gamer and PlayStation 4 user myself,” reads a statement from Ek, “I’m super excited to be able to soundtrack my FIFA 15 Arsenal matches later this spring.”

Sony Partners With Spotify to Launch Playstation Music

For Sony, it’s out with the old, and in with the new.

Today, the tech conglomerate announced that it’s ditching its existing streaming music service, Sony Music Unlimited, and replacing it with a new service called Playstation Music, which will give users access to 30 million songs and 1.5 billion playlists, all powered by Spotify. The new service is set to launch some time this spring on the PS4 and PS3 game consoles, as well as on Xperia smartphones and tablets.

For Sony, this partnership is a bold admission that when it comes to infiltrating the increasingly competitive streaming music industry, even a company like Sony needs some help. It faces existing rivals like Pandora, and until now, Spotify, as well as newer ones, like Apple, which acquired Beats Electronics for $3 billion last year and is now working to make Beats’ music streaming service an integral part of the iPhone experience. Even Google recently got into the streaming space, acquiring the playlist company, Songza, last summer.

With the Spotify partnership, Sony acquires not only industry expertise and an immense library of music, but also a wider international footprint. To date, Music Unlimited has been operating in 19 countries, but Spotify will more than double that number, bringing PlayStation Music to 41 markets at launch.

“Music is a core component of the entertainment offering that consumers expect from Sony, and our goal with PlayStation Music is to provide the most compelling music experiences to the millions of PlayStation Network users around the world,” Andrew House, President and Group CEO of Sony Computer Entertainment, said in a statement. “This partnership represents the best in music and the best in gaming coming together, which will benefit the vibrant and passionate communities of both Spotify and PlayStation Network.”

For Spotify, this partnership is another way of inserting itself into users’ lives. If Spotify is already pre-loaded on devices and in apps, users have less motivation to seek out other services. Spotify took a similar approach when it partnered with Uber last year, enabling Uber riders to play music from their Spotify accounts during Uber rides.

And yet, despite the obvious business advantages to partnering with a major device manufacturer like Sony, Spotify CEO and founder Daniel Ek cited much more mundane motivations for the partnership. “As a gamer and PlayStation 4 user myself,” reads a statement from Ek, “I’m super excited to be able to soundtrack my FIFA 15 Arsenal matches later this spring.”

Slack’s New Acquisition Adds Voice Chat to Its Collaboration Tools

Slack CEO Stewart Butterfield. Ariel Zambelich/WIRED

Soon, it will be a lot easier to do voice and video calls within the Slack online collaboration service, aka the “Trojan horse for bigger ideas.”

That’s because Slack, with just under 100 employees, is acquiring Screenhero—a much smaller desktop collaboration company that graduated from the Y Combinator startup incubator just two years ago.

Screenhero’s software lets two people simultaneously share a desktop and—with the click of a button—have voice chats too. That makes it a natural for Slack, which doesn’t have either of these features built in.

The move is part of the continued and rapid evolution of online collaboration tools. For years, businesses got by with comparative software from Microsoft. But now, so many startups, from Slack to Quip to Evernote, are working to change that, offering a new breed of online tool that are far more powerful—and far easier to use.

Slack CEO Stewart Butterfield liked Screenhero so much that he offered to buy the company immediately after meeting Screenhero’s chief executive, Jahanzeb “J” Sherwani. “The very first thing I said to him was: ‘We’d like to buy you,'” Butterfield says, remembering their meeting over drinks back in July. “It’s my favorite negotiating tactic to be disarmingly direct.”

Butterfield says he was impressed by what Screenhero’s small team had built in such a short time, and he felt that the product was simpatico with Slack. About half of Screenhero’s users were already on Slack, he says.

Soon all of them will be. Slack plans to integrate Screenhero into its core product, and eventually add a video chat feature too. That means that down the line, Screenhero will be discontinued as a stand-alone product. But for Slack users, when they click on their contact’s icon, they’ll be able to share a screen or do voice or video chat, or even set up a group chat. And it will all be archived, Butterfield says.

Typically, screen-sharing apps allow only one person to take control of the computer being shared at a time, but Screenhero is different. Two people can enter text and move things around simultaneously. That’s made it particularly attractive for designers and developers who work in close collaboration. “The idea was this gave you a really immersive screensharing experience where it felt like your team was in the same room,” says Sherwani.

Screenhero is Slack’s second acquisition. Last fall, the company acquired Spaces, a maker of collaborative online documents.

Why the Pointless NYC Subway Shutdown Was Worse Than You Realize

Fearing a major snowstorm, New York officials shut down the subway, a major inconvenience that could have longterm consequences.Metropolitan Transportation Authority of the State of the New York/Flickr

Meteorology and governing are inexact sciences. You have limited information to work with, tremendous time constraints, and way too many variables. You do the best with what you have and hope you get it right.

“It comes down to the governors and mayors to protect public safety,” says Robert Puentes, Director of the Metropolitan Infrastructure Initiative with the Brookings Institute. “They’re doing the best they can with the information they have. Sometimes the information is wrong and they pay the penalty for that.”

But that doesn’t mean after the fact assessments are invalid, especially when millions of people are affected. And in the case of the decision to shut down New York’s public transportation system in the face of a snowstorm Monday night, it looks like the wrong call was made. More than an inconvenience, that could be a bigger problem than you realize, one that could haunt the area years down the road.

With meteorologists predicting blizzard conditions and perhaps as much as 18 inches of snow for New York City, city and state officials moved quickly to shut down as much of the transportation system as possible. Highways were closed to all but essential personnel. The Metro-North and Long Island commuter railroads were shut down, and all bus and subway service was suspended at 11 pm Monday night.

Commuter railroads were shut down as well, making for an eerily empty Grand Central Terminal.Metropolitan Transportation Authority of the State of the New York/Flickr

When Tuesday came, the much-hyped storm was a bust, with New Yorkers standing in less than a foot of snow left wondering why the normally 24-hour subway—even the underground lines—had been shut down. Effectively forcing millions of people to stay at home has obvious consequences: Shops and restaurants don’t get business, public transit and taxis lose out on fares. People can’t get to the pharmacy to pick up medicine, check on relatives, or get to the doctor’s office. It’s way harder for essential city employees to get to and from work.

Causing a temporary halt on economic activity is a hedged bet. You accept these downsides rather than risk stranding people and clogging the roads at an especially inopportune time. Memories of Boston in the 1978 blizzard and and Atlanta in an ice storm last year show what can happen if you don’t. New York has its own memories of catastrophic weather, like Superstorm Sandy in 2012 and a 2010 blizzard. Imagine trying to rescue stranded passengers from a stranded elevated train line in a blizzard. Not fun.

But there’s a good chance New York lost more than the stakes it thought it was putting down, and that it has created a longterm problem for itself.

Protecting people is paramount, but “you don’t want to cry wolf,” says Henry Willis, director of the RAND Corporation’s Homeland Security and Defense Center. “Then people won’t listen to you” when you need them to. The next time a big storm hits, New Yorkers might not heed the warnings to stay home. Or, perhaps even worse, government officials could disregard the warnings of meteorologists and decide not to order a shutdown even when one might be warranted, not wanting to get it wrong again.

Officials in the South who have dealt with hurricanes are familiar with this problem. 2005’s Hurricane Katrina is a good example: Mandatory and voluntary evacuation orders were issued, but disregarded by many. “Some people said they didn’t leave because there had been evacuation warnings in the past and the storm never hit New Orleans,” says Willis. The results were disastrous. (This effect goes both ways: When Hurricane Rita hit Texas a month later, according to Willis, “the evacuation order was more effective than it had ever been.”)

Shutting down the subway is a big deal for New Yorkers. It’s a system that, under normal circumstances, runs 24 hours a day, every day. It’s used more by than 5 million people daily. If it’s not running, normal life in the city does not exist. So its closure could have an outsize effect on the citizen’s psyche. The next time a blizzard’s expected, people may say, “Remember that time they closed the subway because they were so afraid? These government types always overreact.”

Which is the last thing you want people thinking when you really need to clear the streets.

How Throwback Flick Seoul Searching Puts a New Spin on Teen Comedies

courtesy Sundance Institute

PARK CITY, Utah—Seoul Searching is an ’80s movie. Plain and simple. There’s a jock, a kind of preppy girl, a misunderstood punk, a tomboy who gets a makeover. (Though it kind of flips the script on that last one.) It’s even got binge-drinking and kids who fight with their dads. The only difference is, it’s not part of your John Hughes binge-watch weekend, but is showing at a film festival in 2015—and it takes place not in suburban Chicago, but in a camp in South Korea for kids whose families left the country after the Korean War.

Searching—the first feature solely written and directed by Benson Lee (director of documentary Planet B-Boy and its film adaptation Battle of the Year—is also based on a true story. Lee went to that camp as a kid and many of its characters and events are based on what actually happened while he was there.

“This is very much inspired by John Hughes. I’m a huge John Hughes fan, and there are certain tropes in movies that for a teen comedy, you just have to do, like the big dance at the end,” Lee says. “I wanted to respect that Hughes formula but add depth to the characters because they’re going through atypical experiences being in another country meeting disparate people from around the world.”

WIRED sat down with Lee and his cast at Sundance to talk about dressing like Madonna, boss soundtracks, and finding future stars on Facebook.

Elucidating the origin of MDR tuberculosis strains

A study has focused on the evolutionary history of the mycobacterium that causes tuberculosis, and more specifically on the Beijing lineage associated with the spread of multidrug resistant forms of the disease in Eurasia. While confirming the East-Asian origin of this lineage, the results also indicate that this bacterial population has experienced notable variations coinciding with key events in human history. They also demonstrate that two multidrug resistant (MDR) clones of this lineage started to spread concomitantly with the collapse of the public health system in the former Soviet Union, thus highlighting the need to sustain efforts to control tuberculosis. Finally, this work has made it possible to identify new potential targets for the treatment and diagnosis of this disease.

This study was carried out by scientists at the Centre d'Infection et d'Immunité de Lille (CNRS/Institut Pasteur de Lille/Inserm/Université de Lille) and the Institut de Systématique, Evolution, Biodiversité (CNRS/Muséum national d'Histoire naturelle/UPMC/EPHE), working in collaboration with a large international consortium. Its findings were published on 19 January in Nature Genetics.

Tuberculosis remains a major public health problem. The disease is responsible for nearly one million-and-a-half deaths each year, and strains of the infective agent that are increasingly resistant to antibiotics continue to emerge. The lineage of so-called Beijing strains is closely associated in particular with the spread of multi- and ultra-resistant tuberculosis in Eurasia. By studying the genetic fingerprints of almost 5,000 isolates from this lineage, originating from 99 countries (i.e. the largest collection analyzed to date), and then analyzing around a hundred bacterial genomes in more detail, the authors of this study were able to identify its original source and track the main stages in its spread.

The results of these genetic analyses indicate that the Beijing lineage emerged nearly 7,000 years ago in a region lying between northeastern China, Korea and Japan, whence it radiated throughout the world in successive waves associated with historical movements of human populations from east to west. In the modern era, the bacterial population first saw its size increase during the industrial revolution and the First World War. These phases of growth were probably linked to increases in human population density and deprivation respectively associated with these events. The only phase of decline observed thereafter was concomitant with the widespread use of antibiotics during the 1960s. This decline ended in the late 1980s, and was related to the HIV/AIDS epidemic and the onset of multidrug resistance.

This study has also shown that the more recent epidemic spread of the two strains most closely associated with MDR in Central Asia and Eastern Europe coincided with the collapse of the public health system in the former Soviet Union. These findings underline the importance of maintaining highly efficient disease control systems and developing new and more effective methods for diagnosis and treatment.

In this context, the scientists identified a series of mutations and genes that might be connected with epidemic episodes and multidrug resistance. These genes constitute potential targets for treatment and for the development of new and more rapid diagnostic methods for multidrug resistance, based on genomic sequencing.

Story Source:

The above story is based on materials provided by CNRS (Délégation Paris Michel-Ange) . Note: Materials may be edited for content and length.

New protein detonates 'invincible' bacteria from within

Antibiotic-resistant infections are on the rise, foiling efforts to reduce death rates in developing countries where uncontrolled use of antibiotics and poor sanitation run amok. The epidemic of "superbugs," bacteria resistant to antibiotics, knows no borders -- presenting a clear and present danger around the globe.

A groundbreaking discovery from Tel Aviv University researchers may strengthen efforts by the medical community to fight this looming superbug pandemic. By sequencing the DNA of bacteria resistant to viral toxins, TAU researchers identified novel proteins capable of stymieing growth in treacherous antibiotic-resistant bacteria.

The research, published last month in PNAS, was led by Prof. Udi Qimron of the Department of Clinical Microbiology and Immunology at TAU's Sackler Faculty of Medicine and conducted primarily by TAU researcher Shahar Molshanski-Mor.

Fighting from within

"Because bacteria and bacterial viruses have co-evolved over billions of years, we suspected the viruses might contain precisely the weapons necessary to fight the bacteria," Prof. Qimron said. "So we systematically screened for such proteins in the bacterial viruses for over two and a half years."

Using high-throughput DNA sequencing, the researchers located mutations in bacterial genes that resisted the toxicity of growth inhibitors produced by bacterial viruses. In this way, the team identified a new small protein, growth inhibitor gene product (Gp) 0.6, which specifically targets and inhibits the activity of a protein essential to bacterial cells.

The inhibitor was found to cripple the activity of a protein vital to bacterial cells -- a protein that maintains the bacterial cell structure. Malfunction of this bacterial protein consequently resulted in the rupture and consequent death of the bacterial cell.

Technology and collaboration

"The new technology and our new interdisciplinary collaboration, drawing from bioinformatics and molecular biology, promoted our study more than we could have anticipated," said Prof. Qimron. "We hope our approach will be used to further identify new growth inhibitors and their targets across bacterial species and in higher organisms."

The researchers are continuing their study of bacterial viruses in the hope of identifying compounds and processes that facilitate improved treatment of antibiotic-resistant bacteria using yet uncharacterized bacterial viruses' proteins. They believe that further basic knowledge on bacterial viruses biology will eventually lead to unexpected breakthroughs in the fight against antibiotic-resistant bacteria.

Story Source:

The above story is based on materials provided by American Friends of Tel Aviv University . Note: Materials may be edited for content and length.

Slack’s New Acquisition Adds Voice Chat to Its Collaboration Tools

Slack CEO Stewart Butterfield. Ariel Zambelich/WIRED

Soon, it will be a lot easier to do voice and video calls within the Slack online collaboration service, aka the “Trojan horse for bigger ideas.”

That’s because Slack, with just under 100 employees, is acquiring Screenhero—a much smaller desktop collaboration company that graduated from the Y Combinator startup incubator just two years ago.

Screenhero’s software lets two people simultaneously share a desktop and—with the click of a button—have voice chats too. That makes it a natural for Slack, which doesn’t have either of these features built in.

The move is part of the continued and rapid evolution of online collaboration tools. For years, businesses got by with comparative software from Microsoft. But now, so many startups, from Slack to Quip to Evernote, are working to change that, offering a new breed of online tool that are far more powerful—and far easier to use.

Slack CEO Stewart Butterfield liked Screenhero so much that he offered to buy the company immediately after meeting Screenhero’s chief executive, Jahanzeb “J” Sherwani. “The very first thing I said to him was: ‘We’d like to buy you,'” Butterfield says, remembering their meeting over drinks back in July. “It’s my favorite negotiating tactic to be disarmingly direct.”

Butterfield says he was impressed by what Screenhero’s small team had built in such a short time, and he felt that the product was simpatico with Slack. About half of Screenhero’s users were already on Slack, he says.

Soon all of them will be. Slack plans to integrate Screenhero into its core product, and eventually add a video chat feature too. That means that down the line, Screenhero will be discontinued as a stand-alone product. But for Slack users, when they click on their contact’s icon, they’ll be able to share a screen or do voice or video chat, or even set up a group chat. And it will all be archived, Butterfield says.

Typically, screen-sharing apps allow only one person to take control of the computer being shared at a time, but Screenhero is different. Two people can enter text and move things around simultaneously. That’s made it particularly attractive for designers and developers who work in close collaboration. “The idea was this gave you a really immersive screensharing experience where it felt like your team was in the same room,” says Sherwani.

Screenhero is Slack’s second acquisition. Last fall, the company acquired Spaces, a maker of collaborative online documents.

Why the Pointless NYC Subway Shutdown Was Worse Than You Realize

Fearing a major snowstorm, New York officials shut down the subway, a major inconvenience that could have longterm consequences.Metropolitan Transportation Authority of the State of the New York/Flickr

Meteorology and governing are inexact sciences. You have limited information to work with, tremendous time constraints, and way too many variables. You do the best with what you have and hope you get it right.

“It comes down to the governors and mayors to protect public safety,” says Robert Puentes, Director of the Metropolitan Infrastructure Initiative with the Brookings Institute. “They’re doing the best they can with the information they have. Sometimes the information is wrong and they pay the penalty for that.”

But that doesn’t mean after the fact assessments are invalid, especially when millions of people are affected. And in the case of the decision to shut down New York’s public transportation system in the face of a snowstorm Monday night, it looks like the wrong call was made. More than an inconvenience, that could be a bigger problem than you realize, one that could haunt the area years down the road.

With meteorologists predicting blizzard conditions and perhaps as much as 18 inches of snow for New York City, city and state officials moved quickly to shut down as much of the transportation system as possible. Highways were closed to all but essential personnel. The Metro-North and Long Island commuter railroads were shut down, and all bus and subway service was suspended at 11 pm Monday night.

Commuter railroads were shut down as well, making for an eerily empty Grand Central Terminal.Metropolitan Transportation Authority of the State of the New York/Flickr

When Tuesday came, the much-hyped storm was a bust, with New Yorkers standing in less than a foot of snow left wondering why the normally 24-hour subway—even the underground lines—had been shut down. Effectively forcing millions of people to stay at home has obvious consequences: Shops and restaurants don’t get business, public transit and taxis lose out on fares. People can’t get to the pharmacy to pick up medicine, check on relatives, or get to the doctor’s office. It’s way harder for essential city employees to get to and from work.

Causing a temporary halt on economic activity is a hedged bet. You accept these downsides rather than risk stranding people and clogging the roads at an especially inopportune time. Memories of Boston in the 1978 blizzard and and Atlanta in an ice storm last year show what can happen if you don’t. New York has its own memories of catastrophic weather, like Superstorm Sandy in 2012 and a 2010 blizzard. Imagine trying to rescue stranded passengers from a stranded elevated train line in a blizzard. Not fun.

But there’s a good chance New York lost more than the stakes it thought it was putting down, and that it has created a longterm problem for itself.

Protecting people is paramount, but “you don’t want to cry wolf,” says Henry Willis, director of the RAND Corporation’s Homeland Security and Defense Center. “Then people won’t listen to you” when you need them to. The next time a big storm hits, New Yorkers might not heed the warnings to stay home. Or, perhaps even worse, government officials could disregard the warnings of meteorologists and decide not to order a shutdown even when one might be warranted, not wanting to get it wrong again.

Officials in the South who have dealt with hurricanes are familiar with this problem. 2005’s Hurricane Katrina is a good example: Mandatory and voluntary evacuation orders were issued, but disregarded by many. “Some people said they didn’t leave because there had been evacuation warnings in the past and the storm never hit New Orleans,” says Willis. The results were disastrous. (This effect goes both ways: When Hurricane Rita hit Texas a month later, according to Willis, “the evacuation order was more effective than it had ever been.”)

Shutting down the subway is a big deal for New Yorkers. It’s a system that, under normal circumstances, runs 24 hours a day, every day. It’s used more by than 5 million people daily. If it’s not running, normal life in the city does not exist. So its closure could have an outsize effect on the citizen’s psyche. The next time a blizzard’s expected, people may say, “Remember that time they closed the subway because they were so afraid? These government types always overreact.”

Which is the last thing you want people thinking when you really need to clear the streets.

How Throwback Flick Seoul Searching Puts a New Spin on Teen Comedies

courtesy Sundance Institute

PARK CITY, Utah—Seoul Searching is an ’80s movie. Plain and simple. There’s a jock, a kind of preppy girl, a misunderstood punk, a tomboy who gets a makeover. (Though it kind of flips the script on that last one.) It’s even got binge-drinking and kids who fight with their dads. The only difference is, it’s not part of your John Hughes binge-watch weekend, but is showing at a film festival in 2015—and it takes place not in suburban Chicago, but in a camp in South Korea for kids whose families left the country after the Korean War.

Searching—the first feature solely written and directed by Benson Lee (director of documentary Planet B-Boy and its film adaptation Battle of the Year—is also based on a true story. Lee went to that camp as a kid and many of its characters and events are based on what actually happened while he was there.

“This is very much inspired by John Hughes. I’m a huge John Hughes fan, and there are certain tropes in movies that for a teen comedy, you just have to do, like the big dance at the end,” Lee says. “I wanted to respect that Hughes formula but add depth to the characters because they’re going through atypical experiences being in another country meeting disparate people from around the world.”

WIRED sat down with Lee and his cast at Sundance to talk about dressing like Madonna, boss soundtracks, and finding future stars on Facebook.

Animal Cannibalism: Who Does It and Why

Photo: William Warby, via Wikimedia Commons. Distributed under a CC BY 2.0 license.

A recent paper reported an unusual behavior in the normally vegetarian hippopotamus: cannibalism.

Leejiah Dorward of Imperial College London observed two hippos feeding on the decaying carcass on another hippo in Kruger National Park in South Africa. This is only the second confirmed account of hippo cannibalism in the scientific literature.

An herbivore like the hippo might be driven to scavenge meat, even that of other hippos, when food or specific nutrients are scarce.

Cannibalism may be a major human taboo, but it’s surprisingly common in the animal kingdom. And there are a lot of good reasons to eat your own kind.

Extra Nutrition

The larvae of tiger salamanders can take two forms. The smaller type eats aquatic invertebrates, while the larger “cannibal morph” feasts on its non-cannibal companions. The cannibal morphs have broader heads, wide mouths, and jutting lower jaws. Their teeth can be up to three times longer than those of a normal salamander.

Photo: Carla Isabel Ribeiro, via Wikimedia Commons. Distributed under a CC BY-SA 3.0 license.

Researchers have found that cannibal morphs develop when salamander larvae are crowded in large numbers and not related to one another. Experiments suggest that fellow salamanders may make the most nutritious meals.

Cane toads are another amphibian that fattens up through cannibalism. The tadpoles of cane toads, when given a choice between cane toad eggs and similar-looking eggs of other frog species, actually prefer to dine on their own kind. In this case, cannibalism helps the tadpoles grow up big and strong and cuts down on future competition.

Cane toads aren’t safe from cannibalism after metamorphosis, either. Another study found that bigger cane toads wiggle the middle toes of their hind feet to lure younger cane toads close enough to be eaten. Researchers found that in a sample of 28 cane toads, 64 percent of their diet was made up of other cane toads.

Eating Offspring

Photo: http://ift.tt/1v4dvSm mape_s, via Wikimedia Commons. Distributed under a CC BY 2.0 license.

A sloth bear named Khali, housed at the National Zoo, made the news last year for devouring two of her own cubs. A third was removed to be hand-raised by keepers before it met the same fate.

Mothers eating their young can occur due to stress, or when the young is stillborn or weak. This behavior can also benefit the mother. A 2009 study of Mexican lance-headed rattlesnakes showed that 68 percent of new mothers cannibalized all or part of their non-surviving offspring. They likely eat them to recover nutrients after giving birth to get ready to reproduce again.

Even the most devoted mothers may sometimes eat their young. Laurence Culot described a rare instance of maternal cannibalism in moustached tamarins in the wild in Peru. Culot and his colleagues watched as a mother tamarin foraged for fruit with her adult daughter and infant son. Suddenly, the mother bit through her baby’s skull and ate out its brain. Once the mother had eaten the entire head, her adult daughter feasted on the carcass. The researchers suggest that the grisly act may have occurred to benefit the adult daughter, who was pregnant at the time. Sacrificing her own infant may have given her daughter’s offspring a better chance at survival.

Cannibal Kids

While mothers eating their young is relatively common, the opposite occurs, too: offspring devouring their mothers. Matriphagy, or mother-eating, is found in some insects, spiders, scorpions, and nematode worms.

Crab spider mothers provide their young with unfertilized eggs to eat, but it’s not enough. The young spiders also eat their mother over the course of several weeks. It’s a sacrifice that helps the next generation; spiderlings that eat their mothers have higher weights and survival rates than those that don’t.

Photo: Wilkinson M, Sherratt E, Starace F, Gower DJ (2013), via Wikimedia Commons. Distributed under a CC BY 2.5 license.

Caecilians are limbless amphibians that look like giant worms. And while caecilian mothers don’t give their lives to their young, they still feed them with their flesh. The young have specialized, temporary teeth that they use to peel off layers of their mother’s skin. The skin grows back and the young feed some more, for up to three months.

Sibling Rivalry

Sand tiger shark pregnancies may begin with six or seven embryos in the womb, but often only one or two will make it to birth. The first embryonic shark to break out of its egg capsule feasts on its younger siblings and any unfertilized eggs in the womb.

Researchers think this intra-uterine cannibalism allows baby sharks to grow large enough (about three feet) that once they’re born, they are safer from being eaten by predators. It essentially gives them a head start in life.

Fatal Attractions

Female praying mantises are famous for devouring their partners mid-coitus. Male mantises can even continue to copulate after losing their heads to their hungry mates.

A number of spiders also practice sexual cannibalism. The male of the Australian redback spider, a species of black widow, willingly sacrifices himself to the female during sex. Halfway through the mating process, the male somersaults into the much-larger female’s mouth. He continues to transfer his sperm to her while she consumes him.

Photo: CSIRO, via Wikimedia Commons. Distributed under a CC BY 3.0 license.

Maydianne Andrade of the University of Toronto Scarborough found that males that are cannibalized, which happens 65 percent of the time, have longer copulation times and produce twice the number of offspring as those that are not eaten. The male redback spider uses his body as a nuptial gift to nourish his mate and benefit his future progeny.

Some spiders are not as keen as the redback to be eaten by their mates. Among other species of widow spiders, males are preferentially attracted to females that smell as if they’ve just eaten. Fuller females may be more likely to see an approaching male as a mate and not a meal.

At first glance, cannibalism may seem like nature gone awry in the goriest way possible. But these examples show that it can make evolutionary sense to eat one’s own kind. Whether it’s a way to destroy competitors, nourish one’s young, or simply out of hunger, cannibalism can be a shrewd strategy for survival in the animal kingdom.